Progenitor is a massive Wild Talents setting sourcebook from Arc Dream Publishing. Nearly 400 pages long, it's written by Greg Stolze, creator of the One-Roll Engine, co-author of Wild Talents, Godlike, and Unknown Armies, and author of Reign: A Game of Lords and Leaders.

Progenitor is a superhero setting about big ideas. A single woman gains inconceivable power then unwittingly passes it on to a handful of people. They pass it along to others in turn, and so on, and soon thousands of men and women around the world share that strange power in different forms.

Some of them use their powers for their own personal gain or gratification. Others try to help those around them. Others change the world itself.

What will your characters do with that kind of power?

Progenitor features a deep alternate history, exploring the shape of the world as we knew it and the changes that are wrought by metahumans year by year.

Dozens of characters described in great detail, plus the world-spanning movements and new nations that they establish.

Detailed rules allow you to change history as you go, guided by four broad metrics: Suspicion, Technology, Economy and Warfare. Which metrics are most dominant set the tone for international culture. A "one roll" chart generates major developments year by year that can be built into new scenarios and entire campaigns.

Other rules describe gadgeteers' effects on society according to the "metrics" of social change.

There are rules for "syntergenics," memes crafted by activists with superhuman intelligence to affect human behavior with an image and change the world with an idea.

There is endless room for player characters to change the world around them using the new rules, to react to changes worked by rivals and enemies, or to simply try to carry out their lives as the pressures around them build.

This book is expensive for a PDF, so I was worried about getting bang for my buck. I shouldn't have worried. Progenitor is an Earth-like setting, so it rides on the strength of its NPCs and its timeline. The NPCs are simply astounding, very well [...]

For anyone interested in running or developing an alternate timeline for Wild Talents, Progenitor is a must have. Seriously. The year by year timelines of what was going on in America since the mid sixties is key for anyone interested in developing a [...]

For those storytellers looking for a comprehensive and well designed superhero setting, this book is worth the purchase. Progenitor takes advantage of the well designed system and then adds mechanics to make the players able to alter things on a global [...]

Progenitor is like half history book, half Wild Talents super-supplement. Pun intended. This is a huge book that describes a campaign frame in which one Talent started it all. From there, the power spread to offspring and throughout the populace. There [...]

Progenitor offers up an alternate reality setting for the 2nd edition Wild Talents RPG - the basic idea is that the world split off in 1968 with the empowerment of a single woman whose power turns out to be contagious, creating other super powered indi [...]

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